Picture Imperfect

Old photographs tell nostalgic tales about the history of American
schooling. But a closer look reveals some disturbing
details.

It’s almost irresistible. You see a faded old photo, and you want
to slip through its surface to visit the folks peering at you across
the decades. You can practically hear the clop of hooves as horses take
kids to a prairie schoolhouse and smell potatoes roasting in the
potbellied stove at the back of a classroom. These children who put on
their finery for school picture day had no idea that they’d raise
questions for viewers generations later. What would the girl in the
frilly dress say about her teacher? What’s it like for that
rumpled boy in a huge Chicago high school, circa 1940? When
they’re not being photographed, do the kids seated at wooden
desks obediently recite their lessons or slump down in adolescent
petulance?

Actually, the kids don’t need to speak. The pictures
themselves do plenty of talking, and they reveal a lot about the
history of education.

“A photo offers something that no amount of words could
convey. It is a sixtieth of a second of real life,” says Eric
Margolis, an Arizona State University education professor who’s
been analyzing images of old schools for several years. In 2000, he
published an article on his research for the online journal
Education Policy Analysis; and he recently began work on what he
hopes will be two books’ worth of ruminations on his growing
collection of pictures. He considers the photographs historical
“documents” and notes that anyone can time travel, thanks
to the tens of thousands of images stored on the Web sites of the
Library of Congress and the National Archives.

But Margolis, whose collection dates back to 1895, urges viewers to
look at photos with more than nostalgia in mind. “I’m very
skeptical of images,” he cautions. “Unless you’re
trained, you don’t usually ask what’s here and what’s
not here. You don’t usually ask who took this [shot] and for what
purpose.”

One photo, in particular, serves as an example. It’s a
panoramic vista of schoolgirls lolling on a manicured campus, one of
Margolis’ favorites among the 16 he analyzed in his article
“Class Pictures: Representations of Race, Gender, and Ability in
a Century of School Photography.” The moment is completely
staged, he says. How does he know? For one, early 20th-century
technology required that the girls stand still for at least a minute
until the exposure was complete. And, he adds, only a stage-managing
photographer would have thought to arrange the kids in perfectly spaced
clusters so as to draw the viewer’s eye across the landscape.

The photographer had ample reason to play with the scene.
Michigan’s Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial School, where Native
American girls were taught domestic skills, such as cooking and
laundering, was part of a ederal boarding school movement designed,
Margolis explains, “to drag the Indians, kicking and screaming if
need be, into the modern world.” Thousands of kids, he says, were
taken from reservations, stripped of their culture, and punished for
speaking their native tongue. Whenever government officials invited
photographers to such a school, he adds, “they were trying to
make the institution more acceptable, more benign, to the people who
were footing the bill: the taxpayers.”

Other photos that Margolis has collected—and that we’ve
printed along with explanatory captions—are equally intriguing.
There are pictures of separate but equal-looking schools for black
students and images of peaceful classrooms during World War II. One
school, built in 1906 in Hancock, Michigan, was such a source of civic
pride that it graces a postcard, and a public school in Taos, New
Mexico, appears to have been run by nuns.

In almost all the pictures, Margolis sees hints of “the hidden
curriculum,” the socialization lessons that, though not found in
any textbook, are as much a part of schooling as the ABCs. In a
turn-of-the-century photo, for example, youngsters stand obediently at
attention. “These were the days in which we had an economy more
and more based on a factory model that wanted a disciplined
workforce,” he explains. “So schools that taught you to sit
still for eight hours a day were performing a necessary socialization
function because that’s what your work life was going to be
like.”

Anyone with even the slightest interest in history should learn how
to “read” images, whether they’re drawn, painted, or
photographed, according to Margolis. “Think about things like the
founding documents of America,” he says. “Think about how
much time and scholarship have been spent on what exactly was meant by
this phrase or that phrase. [But] the George Washington that hung in
everyone’s classroom—we don’t ask where that came
from. There he is, with his wooden teeth, looking at us, and we never
really talk about that picture.”

Margolis studied images from the Library of Congress's American Memory collection. Includes a
Learning
Page designed "to assist educators as they use the American Memory
web site to teach about United States history and culture."

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